“Do you know what they call me?” the diminutive Captain Aketz said to the boy who was cleaning his cabin in Crocodile’s quarterdeck, though the captain never glanced back at him, just continued staring out the window across the open water to the west.
“Do you?” he asked again, and this time he did glance over his shoulder at the nervous kid.
The young boy, an orphan from Entel, knew better than to look up and match stares with Captain Aketz. He just kept sweeping.
“Fury,” Aketz told him. “Captain Fury.” He gave a little laugh. “Look at me. I am barely larger than you, and what are you, ten years old? Perhaps twelve? Captain Fury! I rather like it. And do you know why I like it, boy? Because it shows that these stupid sidhe underestimate me. Yes, Cipac is formidable, but because I am clever in design and not just a brute. I know how to use the tools, you see?
“Captain Fury!” He said it as if announcing a god, and laughed as he finished. “They think me brutish, and so remain blind to the traps I set. Like this one. Oh, they have me, don’t you know, boy? They have me! They have us. Outmanned and outgunned. Helpless and so very far from shore.”
He laughed again and looked back to the west. Nothing but water as far as the eye could see, and much farther than that, even. Cipac was a long way from her ports and her patrol routes.
By design.
“Sail!” he heard from up above.
“Boy, do come here and sweep this mess from the window jamb,” Aketz ordered, and he pulled open one of the large windows at the tail of his ship.
The cabin boy hustled over and leaned out, lifting his broom to brush whatever it was that had caught Aketz’s eye.
Aketz grabbed the broom and tugged it away as he grabbed the boy by the back of his belt and hoisted him up, over, and out the window, sending him flailing into the ship’s wake.
“It is a shame that these animals know how to speak,” Aketz lamented, closing the window so as not to hear any pathetic screams. “It would be so much easier to confide in them if they had no way to relay such private thoughts.”
He sighed, shook his head, placed the broom to lean in a corner, and exited the cabin, stalking across the main deck to the foredeck, where his first mate stood with the augurs.
“The Dancing Dolphin?” First Mate Cayo asked him when he arrived. “That’s Whirley’s schooner, isn’t it?”
“A good ship,” Captain Aketz replied. “Too good for a filthy buccaneer like Whirley.”
Cayo looked around at every horizon, and they all looked the same. They were far out of the typical shipping lanes south of Freeport, nearest to the bend in the land masses called the Leeward Isles, with no land in sight. Few ships came out this far, for beyond the elbow formed by the Leewards, there was just the open, violent Mirianic, and the islands themselves were no welcoming harbor for Xoconai, Behrenese, or buccaneer alike.
“We came all the way out here for Whirley?” Cayo asked, shaking his head at the mystery of why Whirley or any buccaneer might even be out this far to the east in the first place.
“No,” Aketz explained, motioning for the spyglass, which he put to his eye immediately. “He’s coming all the way out here for us.”
“You did get a spy on the Dolphin.”
“Oh, I did indeed, and as far as Captain Whirley knows, we’re out here light in crew and low on supplies and arrows and ballista bolts.” Aketz lowered his spyglass and turned a perfectly wicked expression onto his augur first mate. “And Captain Whirley knows that when we return to Freeport to resupply, we’re to meet with three other warships to pack hunt until we bring him to Entel to be hanged. His Letter of Reprisal was canceled by City Sovereign Popoca and Grand Augur Apichtli.”
“Canceled? The letter is from Chezru Chieftain Brynn Dharielle. What jurisdiction—”
“Popoca and Apichtli are testing her limits,” Aketz explained. “Whirley was assured in Freeport that the red ’n’ black and his letter meant nothing now, and that the Tonoloya Armada would spare no expense in seeing him hanged.”
“City Sovereign Popoca would spare four ships to chase the Dancing Dolphin?” an incredulous Cayo asked.
“Of course not. But if you were Whirley, with all that information, what would you do?”
“Even were we light in crew and supplies, the Dancing Dolphin would have little chance against Cipac,” Cayo insisted.
“She’s not alone, not hardly.”
Cayo started to respond but bit it back. He turned to the forecastle rail overlooking the main deck to see the chain netting sprawled across the planks, two corners tied to the low ballistae, and with weighted ropes lining them all about.
“Two Bits,” Cayo said.
“Three Bits now, so they claim. All the better, I say.”
Cayo took a deep breath and was glad that Cipac really wasn’t low on warriors and supplies. His light-wave magic had been highly effective against the sailing ships in the last couple of years but was fairly useless against the low-riding barrelboats. They had encountered the bloody-capped dwarfs only a couple of times, but both had resulted in melees and had sent a score of Xoconai sailors to the ocean in shrouds. He didn’t really want to fight them again, but Captain Aketz seemed more than eager.
He studied the chain netting and shook his head.
“It will work,” said Captain Aketz. He smiled as he considered his coming victory and the gain to his already formidable reputation. The buccaneers called him Captain Fury now, and he quite liked the compliment.
He meant to kill them all, and the thought saddened him, for then who would be left to fear him?
“They call me Captain Fury, you know?” Aketz told him, and Cayo nodded. “Surely a brute with such a reputation wouldn’t be clever enough to turn their ambush into a trap.”
“Not this time, ye bastard,” Captain Whirley of the Dancing Dolphin said, his mustached lip curling into a feral snarl. “Hunting me, are ye?” He had taken the Letter of Reprisal from his mainmast and tagged it on his great red peacoat. He wanted Aketz to see it, and to know what Captain Whirley thought of the hubris of the goldfish leaders to believe they could cancel it.
He lifted his spyglass to view the approaching ship, large and fast, and with the unmistakable jaws of those prow-mounted side catapults to identify this unmistakably as the Cipac. His snarl turning to a wicked grin, the powerful buccaneer, thick-bodied and intimidating to all around, slowly lowered his spyglass to scan the water between the two ships.
He caught the motion of the barrelboat only a hundred yards ahead of the Dolphin, moving in pace with the schooner. Three o’ Three, the third boat added to powrie captain Thorngirdle’s hunting pack, playing her role perfectly.
The Dancing Dolphin would keep the Crocodile’s focus high and forward, while the powrie hunters jammed her forward and turned her to put her deadly front guns off-line. Thorngirdle and One o’ Three, and his second, commanding Two o’ Three, would sandwich Aketz port and starboard, rocking her, locking her, while the Dolphin did a deadly dance about her.
“He thought we’d run,” said Cara Blue, who’d served as Whirley’s bosun ever since she had lost her own ship to Cipac a year before.
“He’s filled with the cheers of his Entel bosses,” said Whirley. “He thinks he can beat us all. In a fair fight, he’d be right, but what a fool to be thinking that we’re to fight him fair.”
“To come out this deep for a fight with powries is the move of a fool indeed,” Cara agreed. “Even if you beat the dwarfs, they’ll put holes in your boat, and we’re a long way through rough waters to find shore.”
Whirley lifted his spyglass once more. “Come on, ye dog. Show us yer damned light and be done with it, and then we’ll put ye down.”
“Buckets are filled and ready,” Cara Blue assured him. All the buccaneers knew of Cipac’s wave of light to lead the attacks—the stories of the Swordfish, and three subsequent sinkings, had been whispered a hundred times to every sailor on the Mirianic seaboard.
Now they knew to duck from the wave and were ready to drench the sails and rigging immediately after it passed. As long as Three o’ Three could delay those catapults, the Dolphin might well get out of this wholly unscathed, and what a feather in the great cap of Captain Whirley that would be!
“Hold yer nerve and straight in for a rake when the powries turn her and crunch her,” Whirley told the bosun, who nodded, more than ready to pay back Captain Aketz.
She had watched him keelhaul her bosun and her first mate and feed half her crew to the chummed waters as soon as the sharks had begun their frenzy. He had left her tied to the mainmast in the drifting and slowly sinking wreckage, and only the good fortune and brave acts of a passing Behrenese ship had saved her that day.
Now she was more than ready to give the goldfish wretch his proper payback.
Captains Wilkie and Massayo and others of their sister ships sat in a tavern on the tiny island of Prickly Reef, the so-called “Gateway to the Mirianic,” a mere blot in the rough waters just northeast of the northernmost of the Leeward Islands.
The tavern, Gut Thorns, wasn’t even open yet, the small island wholly deserted, for its operation didn’t begin until the ninth or tenth month of the year, when the season of hurricanes was ended. The proprietors left enough good whiskey, rum, and ale there, though, and the few buccaneers who knew the secret did come here occasionally to just be at ease. They didn’t have to deal much with the hostile islanders of the Leewards here, for the place was deserted during the storm season. Here in this isolated paradise, they had no bother from the noisy Behrenese merchants along the mainland villages, nor the bustle of Freeport, and were out beyond the reach of the goldfish.
So they’d sometimes journey here when they were in the far east and the northern limits of their hunting zones, but coming here was not without some danger, even beyond the obvious perils of the underwater dangers that gave the island its name. Captain Wilkie would usually wait for a storm to blow through before venturing to Prickly Reef, but even that was no guarantee that another vicious hurricane wouldn’t soon follow. And there were thieves, as well, Leeward Islanders from the much larger Scrub Island to the south, who would spot the sails or masts and row their small boats out to steal what they might find in the dark of night.
The proprietors of Gut Thorns were never seen, but the buccaneers always held up their side of the agreement, cleaning up the place whenever they visited if a storm had put it amiss, and leaving proper payment for the use of the tavern—more than would be paid by the Leeward Islanders in the season when the establishment was properly open, but less than the cost of drink and harbor fees in the ports to the west.
The buccaneers would also pay for information when it was left for them—whatever value they deemed it—as was the case this day.
“I do not understand,” said Quauh, shaking her head as she struggled to read the badly penned letter. “How can the grand augur cancel a Letter of Reprisal from the queen of Behren? Are these letters simply an assurance from the queen that she will buy your ill-gotten booty?”
“Our ill-gotten booty,” Massayo corrected her, bringing some laughs.
“He can’t,” Wilkie Dogears explained. “ ’Course he can’t. But that’s not the point. They’re putting out this word to tell everyone that the Dancing Dolphin is fair game—mostly to tell Captain Whirley and his crew. And they’re warning away, or trying to, any merchants or fences who might deal with the ship.”
“It’s a threat,” Quauh replied.
“Aye.”
“An empty one?”
“Not if Aketz sees the Dolphin’s red ’n’ black anywhere but Freeport Harbor,” said Wilkie.
“He can’t touch them in Freeport,” Massayo explained, “whatever the grand augur might decree. That would begin a war before the sound of the first battle stopped echoing.”
“Captain Aketz will attack any ship flying the red ’n’ black,” Quauh said, trying to make sense of it. “Why is this different?”
“It’s telling Captain Whirley that if he was to Crocodile’s starboard and we, or any others, powries or buccaneers alike, were to Crocodile’s port, Crocodile would turn to starboard in full battle station and with no quarter offered. It’s an open threat, and one that’s sent other buccaneers sailing south before a season’s end, to be sure.”
Quauh sat back, trying to digest it all. “It is a stupid game we all play out here.”
“Only gotten stupider since you goldfish came calling,” Wilkie said.
There was no consternation aimed at Quauh in the statement, and none around her gave her a stern look or a sidelong glance. They considered her one of their own now, she understood, though she still wasn’t sure if she liked that or not.
Better than being murdered on that island with the snakes swarming to eat her corpse, she figured.
While most of the others spent the day drinking and sleeping in the shade of the trees beside the tavern, Quauh walked the white sand beach, taking in the smell of the ocean and the brilliant sparkles on water impossibly blue, rolling in lines of whitecaps over the many reefs offshore. She focused on a line off to the west, the waves climbing high over one reef and becoming brilliantly translucent with the setting sun directly behind them.
She thought she’d just stand there until the sun dipped below the ocean—perhaps she’d see the green flash of that moment this night!—but became distracted and startled when she spied a powrie rising above the waterline to her left.
It took her a moment to realize that the fellow was standing atop a barrelboat. He jumped off and splashed his way to the shore, as another came onto the deck. Then another and another, until six of them, half the crew, gathered on the beach.
They saw Quauh, and more than one drew a knife. She held up her hand unthreateningly and slowly backed away, and she was glad indeed when Benny showed up at her side.
“They think ye’re a goldfish,” he said.
“Aren’t I?”
“Aren’t ye? Can’t be a goldfish and a buccaneer, now can ye?”
“Then I aren’t,” Quauh said with a powrie brogue, and Benny laughed and nodded his approval before hailing his fellow bloody caps, who had obviously relaxed at the sight of him.
The group came over.
“What hey, but it’s true that Wilkie’s got a goldfish in his crew,” one remarked.
“She’s Massayo’s,” Benny explained. “As is meself. Sailin’ on Pinquickle’s Folly.”
“Yer old cap’n’s sure to like the name when he comes out o’ the ground in a year, what,” the powrie replied.
“What’re ye boys doing here?” Benny asked.
“Hidin’.”
“Hiding?” Benny and Quauh asked together.
“Aye. The Crocodile’s about, just to the west, and in fine hunting form.”
That brought an exchange of concerned looks between Benny and Quauh.
“And what of the Dancing Dolphin?” Quauh asked. “Any word of Captain Whirley’s boat?”
“Only heared that he’s not runnin’ from Aketz, and that he’s got some help that yerself might know well, Benny McBenoyt.”
The sun dipped below the horizon.
The first stars came out.
The ships closed, neither turning, and between them, the powries continued their quieter charge.
“Keep it low,” Captain Aketz told his first mate, who stood with the other priests by the wave weapon.
Cayo nodded but didn’t stop his chanting, the droning priests building a humming charge from the large crystal set within the golden mirrors.
“One-fifty!” the lookout called down.
“Blind those powries and turn that schooner to kindling,” said Aketz.
“One hundred yards!” cried the lookout.
The augurs loosed the energy, the wave of light reaching forth, skimming the water like a serpent—a hot serpent that sent wafts of hissing fog all about. It crossed over the barrelboat, showing it starkly as it passed, and certainly blinding any powrie foolish enough to be looking through the crude periscope of the craft.
On it went to the Dancing Dolphin, splitting over her bowsprit and riding her forecastle back to the sails.
“Barrel to port!” cried the second lookout.
“Barrel to starboard!” shouted the third.
Captain Aketz’s tight, thin-lipped grin creased his face from ear to ear.
“Got them!” he said of the barrelboat, now less than fifty yards ahead, for the hatch popped open and out came a powrie tugging a large box. “Again, now!”
The augurs released a second pulse. The powrie, opening the box, didn’t even notice it until it was too late.
The dwarf glanced over his shoulder at the last moment, then turned back, spitting curses at the sting on his face and his eyes.
He should have shut the box instead.
“Second wave!” cried several on the Dolphin. “Cover! Cover!”
The captain and crew scrambled to shield themselves from the painful beam, which was easy enough to avoid. Whirley and the others were surprised by it. Why would the Cipac waste the effort?
They got their answer before the wave ever reached their ship, for the powrie on Three o’ Three was readying the magnesite flares when the wave swept past, and the metal immediately ignited in a great flaring white-hot fireball. The shocked powrie yelped in pain and went tumbling off, which was the only chance he had at survival, as it happened, for the splashing of the sea against the barrelboat sent water into the chest of flares.
When those flares were lit, powries took great care to prevent any water hitting them, for if they got wet in that state…
The explosion on Three o’ Three sent a shock wave rolling out in all directions, and blew the barrelboat apart, leaving twelve powries in the water, half of them dead before they ever got wet.
As soon as the wave passed the Dolphin, Whirley jumped up, his jaw hanging slack.
“But the gods,” he muttered. “Get us out of here, mate Blue. Get us out of here!” He leaped about, shouting to his shocked crew. “Fire! Fire! Throw everything we have at them! Hard to port!”
He glanced back and closed his eyes. Like the hunting monster that gave this goldfish warship its name, the Cipac only seemed to be coming on faster.
And her great jaws swung from either side of her prow, filling the air with burning pitch.
And her archers, a hundred archers, sent forth their barrage of flaming death.
Three o’ Three was supposed to ram and turn the hunter, but Three o’ Three was gone, just gone.
Captain Aketz grabbed the rails of the forecastle ladder and slid down to the main deck, nodding to his ballista crews. “Fifteen yards out, no more,” he reminded them.
The gunners nodded, but neither took their eyes off their incoming targets, powrie barrelboats speeding in to intercept quite rudely, port and starboard. These were seasoned sailors, veteran gunners, who could gauge distance perfectly to fifty yards with eyes alone.
The barrelboats rushed in. Port fired first, for that barrelboat was nearer, both ballistae throwing their heavy spears out, beyond and to either side of the approaching barrelboat, draping the metal net they carried between them over it, tower to stern and beyond, where it sank right into the craft’s propeller.
The craft lost speed and momentum immediately, as did the one coming to starboard.
And immediately, the appointed crewmen, strong Xoconai lads and lasses, began spinning the ropes weighted with heavy blocks, launching them out of the spin into the water at the side and behind the trapped barrelboats. Those ropes were lashed to the metal netting, a score of small anchors tugging the stern of each of the barrelboats down, down.
The barrelboat to starboard actually had enough forward movement to bump against the Cipac as she sailed out from between the intended crunch, but it had little momentum about it, and did no damage, and even amused the Xoconai archers on the quarterdeck as a powrie tried to open the netted hatch. They taunted the dwarf and put arrows all about him.
“One destroyed, two dead in the water, and the schooner on fire,” First Mate Cayo said to Captain Aketz. “That was a fine minute’s work.”
“Supported by a solid month of planning and drilling,” Aketz reminded him. He wanted nothing to be taken as luck out here, nothing to diminish his brilliance in this, his most impressive battle yet.
“Pedal!” Thorngirdle yelled to his struggling crew. “Pedal!”
“She’s stuck!” one yelled back, groaning and putting all his weight into the pedal, to no avail.
“Rudder’s dead, too!” said the helmsdwarf at the back.
One o’ Three groaned in protest, her prow going up as if on a swell. But no, Thorngirdle realized, they weren’t climbing with a rolling wave. Their stern was sinking!
More splashes could be heard about them. On a nod from the captain, a powrie scrambled up the short tower and tried, unsuccessfully, to open the hatch, then came back down fast, holding an arrow that had cut across his cheek.
“Weights?” Thorngirdle asked.
The shot dwarf nodded.
One o’ Three upended, stern down, and the dwarfs went tumbling, Captain Thorngirdle bouncing among them all the way to the tail.
Miles away on Prickly Reef, the great flare lit the sky beyond the horizon as if the sun itself had changed its mind and jumped back out of the water.
Quauh saw it, as did Benny and many others ashore and on the moored ships.
“How far?” asked Massayo, rushing to join Quauh and Benny.
“Beyond three miles, clearly,” said Quauh. She nodded her chin toward Pinquickle’s Folly. “Chimeg’s in her nest. She’ll give us a better guess.”
“Get Toomsuba and get the boats,” Massayo ordered Benny. “Be quick and collect the crew ashore.”
“What are you thinking?” Quauh asked the captain when Benny had gone.
“Crocodile?” Massayo asked more than answered. “Maybe Whirley found her.”
“Or Captain Aketz found him,” said Quauh.
“We’re not going to know out here,” Massayo replied.
“And we might find out too intimately if we go out there,” Quauh reminded him, and the tall man nodded.
“We get to Pinquickle and get ready to sail,” he told her. “And go tell Captain Wilkie, who’s sure to join. I’m not getting caught here. We’ll sail in the morning when the sun’s up, when we can see the Crocodile from a long way off. Far enough so that he won’t catch us.”
“And if it is Captain Whirley and he and his helper ships won the fight?”
“Then we’ll take them back here and buy them enough spirits to keep them drunk through the summer,” Massayo assured her.
They spent a nervous night on Pinquickle’s Folly, as did Wilkie and his crew on the ship beside them. No one slept, all eyes looking outward for some sign. From above, Chimeg guessed the flash, whatever it might be, at five or six miles, at least, and she could see a fire out there, a ship burning.
“Like the Swordfish,” Massayo muttered, not liking that information. If it was a fight between the Cipac and the Dolphin, he doubted very much that the Cipac would be the one burning.
They sailed out with the sun rising behind them, straight to the west, then southwest. Soon after they cleared the crossing currents and treacherous reefs, going to full sail, they noted a thin black line of smoke from sea to sky out in the west.
The two ships widened the water between them, ensuring that at least one could get away, and approached more cautiously.
Long before Chimeg and her peer on Port Mandu shouted down confirmation, Massayo knew it to be the Dancing Dolphin out there ahead. He knew well the profile of Captain Whirley’s schooner.
She sat dead in the water, rolling and turning with the quiet swells, her sails and rigging burned away, her masts standing naked, yards askew, like old, dead trees in a moor.
No other boats were to be seen. Whatever or whoever had hit them—and Massayo was quite certain that it had to be the Crocodile—was long gone.
“Too far to tow the trophy in,” Massayo said to Quauh.
“Do you think there’s anyone aboard her?”
Massayo gave her a skeptical look. “Alive?” he asked, and he could only shrug.
They bumped through wreckage as they neared, and passed among bodies floating in the sea—parts of them, anyway, in water red with blood, the rolls of the reddened waves occasionally cut by a dorsal fin.
“Gaffs to the rails,” Quauh called, on the off chance that they came upon something or someone worth saving.
But no, the destruction and death seemed complete.
“They chummed the damned water and fed ’em all to the sharks,” Benny growled at one point, tugging up his gaff and the left shoulder, neck, and head of a dead powrie.
“That’s Captain Malachi, Two o’ Three,” Columbine said.
“Got one!” came a cry to starboard, and all on the deck turned to view Port Mandu, which had pulled up alongside the dead Dolphin, her boarding planks already set. Quauh and Massayo watched as a sailor was cut down from the mainmast, a woman who fell limply into the arms of her rescuers.
“Cara Blue,” Massayo said.
“There, to port!” cried the musician Dalila, jumping up and down and thrusting her finger to the north.
Massayo and Quauh ran over, fearing that she had seen the hunter’s sails. Their fears turned fast to curiosity, though, when they noted the object that had caught Dalila’s eye: a sharp beam pointed skyward and bobbing in the water.
“That’s a barrelboat or I’m a golden-haired Durubazzi,” said Aushin.
“Good one, lad,” McKorkle congratulated, and the younger powrie beamed with pride.
“Take us there, Quauh,” Massayo ordered.
They got gaff hooks into the beam, which was now clearly the ram of a barrelboat, soon after, then pulled it and secured it to the side, but they hadn’t the winches, beams, or manpower to hope to pull it up.
“She’s netted!” Columbine noted. “And anchored down!” He fell back as he finished, for a huge shark drifted past, putting away any notion of anyone diving down beside to try to cut those ropes.
“Put a rope on it,” Quauh ordered, just get it up enough to get air below the ram. “Toomsuba!”
They tugged and fought but could only shake their heads. Quauh ordered the boat secured and sails to full, so they could tow it away from the carnage and the sharks, and once the water seemed clear of the hungry fishes, she went into the water herself with a knife to try to cut the barrelboat free of its drags. She actually made some headway, and when she came up, Columbine was next down, then Perridoo, Aushin, and McKorkle all at once.
For all their efforts, they did manage to cut away enough anchors to put the craft higher in the water, high enough for Benny to sit on the ram and chop away at the hull to make a small hole. As soon as he got through, he could hear the weak voices inside, pleading desperately for help.
It took the rest of the morning, but they finally extracted seven powries alive from the wreckage, including none other than Captain Thorngirdle, who called back to those still in One o’ Three to get the hearts of the dead five.
“We saw a great ball of white fire,” Massayo said to Thorngirdle. “Was that Aketz’s doing?”
“Aye, but not on his own. His light wave caught a box o’ flares and set them to burnin’, and we’re guessin’ that a splash o’ water caught the flares and blew Three o’ Three and her crew to little bits.”
“And Two o’ Three?” Massayo asked.
Thorngirdle shrugged. “Guessin’ they got the same treatment as us, and luck alone kept us from slippin’ under the water. Two o’ Three’s likely out there near the Dolphin.”
“But on the bottom,” Massayo reasoned.
“Bad death” was all Thorngirdle would reply.
Massayo patted the powrie on the shoulder and walked away, calling Benny to his side.
“Water ruins the flares?” he asked.
“Nah, only if they’re burnin’. Then ye’re not wanting to be near ’em.”
“Can you get back into One o’ Three?”
Benny shrugged.
“Salvage what you can, including her flares,” Massayo told him. “Let’s bring some powrie ingenuity to Pinquickle’s Folly, eh?”
“Eh,” Benny agreed, and he hopped away. When he was done with his work, salvaging little besides a flare box, some soaked clothing, and three kegs of fresh water, they cut the ruined barrelboat away and sailed back to the wreckage, coming up beside Port Mandu, who had pulled away from the dead schooner. Massayo and Quauh went aboard their lead ship to speak with Captain Wilkie.
“Cara Blue,” Wilkie told them, indicating the battered sailor sitting against the quarterdeck’s front wall, wrapped in a blanket, her eyes vacant, expression blank with shock. “First mate. Only survivor. They keelhauled Whirley, and when he came up somehow alive, they did it again. And all the while, they chummed the waters, drawing in the sharks, and fed all who survived the fight to them, hanging them head-down from a beam one by one and taking bets on how long before a shark might leap up to tear off each one’s head.”
He stared at Quauh the whole time he recited the gory description. She tried to hold steady against his accusing gaze, but surely her heart was broken, and she found herself greatly ashamed.
“The flare we saw was a barrelboat,” Massayo explained. “Aketz killed three of them besides the Dolphin.”
“We knew he was formidable, and vicious,” Wilkie replied.
“We got Thorngirdle alive, along with a few of his crew. His boat’s wrecked, and the third of the pack is likely below us. Maybe to the bottom, maybe only halfway down, netted and weighted with anchors.”
“Let’s sail about and see what we can see, but we’re not lingering long,” Wilkie told him.
The two ships circled the area for more than an hour, all hands lining the rails and peering into the gloom of the Mirianic for some clue of Two o’ Three.
But they never found her, and they filled their sails with a following wind, sailing straight to the south inside the arm of the Leewards. Two full days passed before they dared turn west, sailing back for the protected islands near to the sands of Behren.
Quauh spent her free time at the forward rail, digesting all that she had seen and all that she had heard.
Thinking.
She heard the voice of Lahtli Ayot in her mind, warning her of the sidhe, demanding of her no mercy.
How hollow it sounded now.
“Yerself okay there, Sparkleface?” Benny asked her at one particularly difficult point. The powrie plopped down beside her.
“I am okay, Benny,” she assured him, though she heard little conviction in her voice.
“What’d I tell ye when we started, eh?”
Quauh looked at him curiously.
“We’ll be finding some real fun afore the summer’s surrenderin’ to fall. Haha!” said the dwarf.
“Fun?”
“Aye. It’s all a game, girl. So just play it and take yer laughs where ye might and let go yer pains soon as ye can.”
“You heard what Captain Aketz did to the crew of the Dancing Dolphin.”
“Aye, and to Three Bits. And might be that we’re finding the same bad deaths.” Benny shrugged. “That’s the game, and that’s why we play when we can. That’s why Cap’n Massayo’s got musicians aboard, and why me and me boys drink and gamble and put our fists into each other’s eyes, and why yer kind drinks and gambles and humps till they fall to the floor for a long nap, eh.”
“Eh,” Quauh said half-heartedly.
“No one’s blamin’ ye, Sparkleface, not even Cap’n Wilkie, who telled Cap’n Massayo that he was sorry for starin’ hard at ye when he was telling o’ the murders.”
He clapped her hard on the shoulder.
“Me one-handed friend, are ye a goldfish or are ye a buccaneer?”
Quauh thought about it for just a heartbeat, before giving a helpless little laugh and replying, “I’m a buccaneer.”
In that moment, at least, she meant it, for in the face of the actions of the man now tagged as Captain Fury, it seemed to her to be the more moral choice.